You've hit it exactly. How does a non-professional blogger maintain their brand when it is diffusing all over the Net thanks to social aggregators that pop up like mushrooms? The "loss" of conversation may not be offset by any benefits of increased awareness of your work -- especially if you don't know about it because it's taking place where you aren't.

But I agree with Duncan - those with a financial interest in commoditizing content will make this inevitable. You might as well go along for the ride...

The biggest problem, IMHO, is how this is going to wear on everyone. Duncan, you well know the burnout associated with this as a job. Add more places you have to "follow the conversation" and more "services" like FriendFeed and I wonder how many people are going to have full-scale melt-downs trying to leverage themselves in Blogging 2.0. Some of these folks have day jobs to fall back on. ;)

Duncan, That is certainly an improvement...you might want to make sure that double indexing of content is not an issue with Google...And you have a strategy in place to reimport your comments in case you need to avoid data lock-in...Thanks, Jitendra

"If blogging 1.0 was about enabling the conversation on each blog, blogging 2.0 is about enabling the conversation across many blogs and supporting sites and services. The conversation has matured and no longer is it acceptable to believe that as a content owner you hold exclusive domain over conversations you have started."

Bang on!!!! Copyright probably goes out the window as well! I even killed my blog, of course I reached my target - financially, intellectually and otherwise... Blogging 1.0 is dead.... conversations will rule!

Duncan, "blogging 2.0 is about enabling the conversation across many blogs and supporting sites and services." So if I post about this from WordPress*, the ping will show up here, right?We'll soon see - or perhaps we won't.But thank you for providing the prod that made me set up a Disqus account.* http://changingway.org/2008...

As I just commented on Louis Gray, this is very true for tech blogs, but for many non-tech blogs, they use the internet as a tool, nothing more. It's simply a way to disseminate info. It might be a new way, with different rules, but as much as they don't understand how a printign press, or printer work, they don't really care how stuff gets up there and out there. Their readers don't know what disqus is, probably haven't heard of twitter etc. For these people, they're going to be exceptionally slow to get this stuff and cede control. And frankly, their largely likeminded users probably won't care either.

Web 2.0 is telling big media and big business endlessly that its all about the user. Funny that bloggers are having trouble with the concept. Go where the people are and set your content free:) Im flirting with disqus. Sometimes it seems a bit, well, messy.

Hi JitendraNot an issue in my case as I've implemented the Disqus API plugin (not the JS one) so in theory all of this content should be seen by Google and others, it was one of the selling points to me in implementing it.

Hey Duncan, Jitendra from SezWho here...Losing control of ones comments (and SEO benefits and freshness etc. of your site - important for Google or TechMeme etc.) is really not needed to get all the community/threading features provided by Disqus. SezWho provides all the community/context services without taking over your content...In addition there are a number of other plugins that will replicate the other features of a comment replacement system without replacing your comments (E.g. Brian Threaded comments for threaded discussion etc.)... My 2 cents.

Couldn't agree more. I am genuinely perplexed about bloggers who are obsessive about ownership of blog comments (Disqus), retaining control over 'their' content and fragmentation of the conversation (FF et al).

If I choose to leave a comment on a blog, surely I 'own' that comment as much (if not more so) than the blog owner.

I couldn't care less who/what/where is commenting about my blog, I'm just delighted that they are.

as can I, although I'm not sure this is so much havok and confusion (revolution) as opposed to evolutionary change. We've since bits and pieces of this in the past with the original coComment, some of RSS readers even.

Right on. :) I'm trying to get used to this change myself, but it definitely requires more work. I'm a big fan of Disqus now, as I believe its integration with FF ultimately bring in more blog comments (I've experienced this). I can't wait until Disqus and FF work better together. I think a lot of the criticism (especially my own) will then die down.

Disqus is on the ball. They seem to working with the main services that count and they have a great service. The Seesmic thing is a bit edgy, but I like it. Although I think video blog comments are a tough road to hoe, I'm trying it out (and would done so here). BTW, video comments might make people more civil, because it removes some anonymity.

microrahsheenIt is a new perspective, but it also throws out a lot of the established practices many of us have grown up with (pardon the phrase) in blogging. It's literally blogging 2.0, finally the social networking/ mesh of other services is transforming blogging as well.